There’s a huge wall of patents at the Tesla factory in San Francisco. It draws an intellectual borderline to anyone wanting to make electric cars. It makes Tesla products, truly Tesla.
But today, the multimillion dollar legend and CEO of two successful companies, Elon Musk, wants to change all that. The wall, both figuratively and legitimately, has been removed. Starting today Tesla’s technology will be legal for anyone to use it. The company “will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone, who in good faith, wants to use our technology”.
Tesla doesn’t want to become the largest electric car company, no. They have a broader goal in mind. They want to over throw the entire gasoline industry.
“Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. “
Musk reminisces to his initial days of entrepreneurship, back when he founded Zip2. He says patents made sense back then, but not anymore. They rather act as a hindrance to progress and invention.
“After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible.”
When he started Tesla, he felt compelled to file patents out of concern that big car companies would copy their technology and back it up with their massive manufacturing and marketing powers. But they couldn’t have been more wrong. They realized that electric car programs at these huge car companies were so small that they hardly constituted to 1% of the total vehicle sales.
The notion to outsource their technology was not entirely selfish. They also seek to hasten the electric car production. The annual production of new cars is reaching 100 million, and the global statistics is about 2 billion cars a year. It would be impossible for Tesla to produce enough electric cars to over throw the gasoline powered cars and put an end to the carbon crisis. By making their technology available to everyone, they are accelerating the production of electric cars, saving the world and widening the market for Tesla’s excellence.
In an amazing slap-on-the-face, Elon Musk states,
“Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.”
We can never have progress by limiting technology to only a handful of people, we have to attract and motivate the world’s brightest minds. And by open sourcing it’s technology, Tesla believes that they strengthen their position with this move.